Council’s homeschooling plan ‘illegal infringement of rights’.
education
Selling our kids’ inheritance
The newspapers have been full of comment this week on how there has been nothing to support families in the government mid-term review, something that the Christian Institute highlight here.
However the majority of UK Christians have not woke up to the fact that our secular establishment are actively seeking to ensure they do anything but support the family unit, as it’s a huge threat to their own agenda.
The latest move to decrease or remove child-benefits while at the same time increasing the childcare tax allowances to support working mothers by providing for nursery care, is a prime example of this in action.
The government has no interest in seeing parents raise their own children – they may end up becoming free-thinking enough to oppose the very worldview the secular government is frantically preaching.
- Children who spend the majority of their time at home are likely to take on the worldview of their parents
- Children who spend the majority of their time in state funded childcare are likely to take on the worldview of the state.
Far better to reward parents for indoctrinating their children from infancy with the message that the state is their god who provides for their every need, than allow godly parents to nurture young plants that will in time, become the Lord’s oak trees.
Classical Christian education
I would recommend to virtually any parent asking one simple question to the person heading their children’s school: “What is your goal for my children when they graduate from this school?”
There is a good article by Bradley Green on the objective and benefits of a classical education here. For much modern education there is little or no overall philosphy of what we are trying to achieve with our children.
Much of what comes under the label of education merely seeks to get children to an arbitrary, and some would argue ever-decreasing, academic standard. Given what God has instructed us regarding our responsibilities to our children, Christian parents ought to desire more than this for their child’s education. Green rightly says,
Classical schools—at their best—hold that education is ultimately about the formation of a certain kind of person. While different schools may disagree on this or that pedagogical theory, or this or that curriculum choice, virtually any classical school desires to reach back and recover the notion that education is about human formation and transformation.
The best Christian education sees this task as a transformative endeavor that prepares students for (1) a meaningful, faithful, wise, virtuous life in the present, and also for (2) our ultimate destiny—to one day see God face-to-face and know him fully. Once we begin to grasp that true education is best construed as a person-forming endeavor, we are able to see more clearly the link between the gospel and education.
How we should pray for more schools like this in the UK.
WHATEVER IS COMMENDABLE 